Bowie

Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice of singer Matt Johnson politely asked the audience to refrain from using mobile phones when the band was performing. In Edinburgh, while Johnson was speaking, the chap next to me was preoccupied filming an empty stage. A sea of screens can be priceless in a genuine emergency but that’s about it As it happens, most of the crowd complied most of the time, but proscribing phone use at concerts is increasingly challenging. A few artists are up for the fight. As they enter the venue, fans attending Bob Dylan’s forthcoming

This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the BBC’s Bowie films, including The Last Five Years, has patched together old recordings and new interviews with Bowie’s lovers and friends to examine his life in West Berlin between 1976 and 1978. It was a fraught, make-or-break time. Out of pocket, addicted and depressed, Bowie had grown ‘very, very worried’ for his life. It isn’t entirely clear why he chose Berlin as a place for recovery, other than that it was unstarry, cheap and a good distance from LA, where his troubles had spiralled. Unfortunately, it was also ‘the smack

The ploy of releasing an album without any advance warning comes into play when an artist feels they are being paid either too much or too little attention. The stealth arrival of Jack White’s new solo album falls firmly into the second category. Putting out music in this way ensures additional media coverage and a certain level of intrigue I didn’t love White’s old band, the White Stripes, back when they were a garage-rock/blues revival phenomenon in the early 2000s. Since their demise in 2011, the world seems to be coming around to this way of thinking. Their most successful albums, Elephant and White Blood Cells, hold little cultural currency

Bob Dylan is heading into the new year with a reduced property portfolio, having sold his Scottish bolthole, Aultmore House in Speyside, for a shade over four million quid. Though the spec looks grand – 16 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a folly (to complement his Christmas album, presumably) – only one aspect interests me: did Dylan ever write anything notable there? Is some piece of the Cairngorms National Park forever preserved in a line – perhaps the one he cribbed from Robbie Burns about his heart being in the Highlands – that came to him while gazing out enigmatically over the croquet lawn? Where musicians wrote their songs remains a crucially

The definition of ‘pop star’ in the Collins English Dictionary is unambiguous: ‘A famous singer or musician who performs pop music.’ Well, that seems fairly self-explanatory, doesn’t it? It also seems way wide of the mark, because being a pop star (or a rock star, its longer-haired cousin) encompasses a great deal more than being famous for singing pop songs. As Nik Cohn wrote, describing the first flush of idols of the rock’n’roll age, they were ‘maniacs, wild men with pianos and guitars who would have been laughing stocks in any earlier generation… They were energetic, basic, outrageous. They were huge personalities and they used music like a battering ram.’

Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes at the moment featuring interviewer and interviewee locked in passionate heart-to-hearts in which a few, carefully selected beans are spilled to no real consequence or effect. The Last Bohemians makes no claim to shatter the earth with secrets, but the guests are so unguarded that the episodes possess that longed-for bite. Maggi Hambling reels off a to-do list she made at art school while she was seeking to lose her virginity: ‘Older man, younger man, black man, woman’. Dana Gillespie, singer and former flame of David Bowie, describes undoing her